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We are now in the fifth month of Barack Obama’s third year in office. Unemployment is at 9.0 percent. We’re about 7 million jobs short of where things stood when Obama took office. Economic growth in the first quarter was 1.8 percent. Housing prices have fallen for 57 consecutive months. Only one in three Americans approve of the way Obama is handling the economy, the lowest point since he took office, and nearly eight in 10 American are less optimistic about the economy than they were a few months ago.

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On its face, House Speaker John Boehner’s demand for perhaps more than $2 trillion in spending cuts may look like a dangerous escalation in the political battle over raising the federal debt ceiling by a similar amount. But the reductions would be over 10 years, they’d be in line with several budget proposals, and they would represent only a modest down payment on austerity.